Washington Monument

End Voter Suppression And Gerrymandering

Voter Suppression began with our founders, when they left the details of who could vote to the states. With a few exceptions, the states only allowed men, who owned land, to vote. A few states allowed women who owned land to vote, but removed this right in 1807.

Not until 1865, 89 years after the Declaration of Independence, could all white men vote, even if they did not own land.

Black men were given the right to vote in 1870, 94 years after the Declaration, but slave states prohibited them from voting by literacy tests, poll taxes, intimidation, and whites only primaries.

For 144 years after the Declaration Of Independence, voting was withheld from women. In 1920 this ended, but white women were the main beneficiaries. Suppression of voting for women of color were still persisted in many places.

American Indians were prohibited from voting with the excuse that they did not pay taxes on the reservation.

In 2018 states tried to suppress voting of minorities by purging the ranks of eligible voters, for a variety of reasons. They made voting more difficult by requiring an exact match with people’s address information. If a single comma was out of place someone was put in question as a registered voter. One state, with a large native Indian population, required that each voter have a street address, which many Indians, living on the reservation, did not have. Nation TV news ran a story of a small town that moved its polling place out of town to make it more difficult for people to vote, using the excuse that there was too much construction at the old polling place, something that was not visible from the TV station videos.

Gerrymandering has existed since the 1788. Isn’t time we eliminate it in all states. Some states have prohibited gerrymandering of their own free will, like California. Some states have been restrained by the courts, like Pennsylvania. Some states are now facing initiatives to end gerrymandering, like Colorado. It is astonishing gerrymandering has continued for so long.